A Startup Aims to Bring E-commerce & Blockchain Closer Together

Korona is working on a blockchain-based platform that will make it easy for merchants to launch online stores and accept Korona tokens.

The fact that we and many other sites across the Internet are talking about cryptocurrencies doesn’t mean digital currencies are well received by the general public. Quite the contrary, most people have only heard about them, and that’s the chance we early adopters have — to position ourselves on the market while it is still not mainstream.

The situation is similar with e-commerce sites; with notable exceptions like Overstock, most online retailers don’t accept payments in crypto. That’s a shame for all of us — online stores could get some free publicity for “going crypto” and we could be able to spend our cryptocurrency.

But I digress, though the point was to create a relation between e-commerce and cryptocurrencies, cause that’s what we’re going to talk today; to present you with a project that aims to do just that. The name of that project is Korona, and its authors are paving the way for what they call…

The second crypto-economic boom

According to Korona, the current blockchain payment systems are geared towards investors, with the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum not working well for everyday transactions. Rather, they are considered a store of value, though Ethereum is also a platform for other things – like running decentralized apps.

Korona aims to build an ecosystem for cryptocurrency payments and eliminate bottlenecks so that we could enter the “second crypto-economic boom.”

The company plans to do that with the “Lightning Network technology,” which could bring the processing times of crypto transactions in line with fiat payments while keeping costs down.

On the other hand, the same system would feature a decentralized marketplace that would help shoppers find the product they want for the price they want.

All this Korona dubs the “Crypto Economy 2.0.”

Making e-commerce and crypto work together

As we have briefly mentioned above, most e-commerce websites don’t accept crypto payments. Or as Korona likes to put it – e-commerce and crypto are “barely connected.”

They hope to build a “necessary link” by offering a digital payment platform that can be easily integrated into existing systems used by online retailers.

Also, to sweeten the deal and help the further growth of e-commerce, Korona will provide smaller retailers which seldom have the resources to launch their own web stores with a “modern, freely accessible and usable web store platform frame.” This service will be provided for free to all merchants which decide to accept Korona tokens as a form of payment.

From there, merchants’ items will be included in the Korona Market which shoppers will be able to access to browse all the different products they can buy with their Korona tokens.

In other words, Korona is working on a blockchain-based service that combines an e-commerce platform with comparison shopping. Sounds promising, though not as easy to develop.

Starting with the EU

Initially, Korona plans to launch in three European Union markets and steadily grow from there. The reason, they say, is that some products tend to have different prices in different EU countries and with a unified Korona Market, they want to enable users to save some money.

As for the initial merchants, the service will kick off with pet shops, grocers, breweries and barbers among others. Then, the idea is to grow this list “exponentially,” and eventually make Korona available in other places around the world.

ICO is under way

Korona’s Initial Coin Offering (ICO) has started on April 23 and is lasting for 60 days. The company plans to set aside 10 percent of tokens as a “flexibility reserve mechanism” to reduce any short-term volatility.

In the meantime, Korona will work on its crypto wallets for Windows, Mac OS and Linux; along with a system for smartphones so that shoppers could eventually spend their tokens in physical stores.

Sounds like a plan, but again – saying is not doing. From what I can tell, the Korona team has a long way ahead to realize on its bold promises.

DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed here are author's alone, not those of any partner bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other partner. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.

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